If you take one of Vienna’s classic red-and-white trams along the length of the Ringstrasse, the street that surrounds the city’s historic first district, the grandeur of the former seat of the Habsburg empire is on full display: the wide expanse of the Heldenplatz, the stately facade of the Vienna Opera House, and the manicured grounds of the Volksgarten.
With its grand, gilded buildings, Vienna feels almost a bit too big to be the capital of an Alpine nation of only 9 million people. Compared with other major European capitals such as Paris, Berlin, and Rome, Vienna can today sometimes seem like an afterthought.
Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World, Richard Cockett, Yale University Press, 464 pp., $35, November 2023
In Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World, published this month, the British historian and writer Richard Cockett seeks to correct that impression. He argues that Vienna has had an outsize—and under-acknowledged—impact on Western thought. In his telling, thinkers who grew up in the intellectual climate of pre-World War I Vienna and the fiery, change-filled 1920s and ‘30s have planted the seeds of the city’s ideas across the Western world.
Vienna is the city that “lit the spark for most of Western intellectual and cultural life in the twentieth century,” Cockett writes. “In any field … from business to advertising, from philosophy to shopping malls, from espionage to modern ceramics, there was usually a Viennese at the root of it.”
Tracing most of modern Western thought back to Vienna is a tall order. But Cockett’s 464-page book offers plenty of evidence to bolster what may seem like, as he acknowledges, “an absurdly extravagant claim.” By the end, the claim remains ambitious but hardly extravagant, and Cockett makes a convincing case for paying greater attention to the city and its legacy.
Other writers, most notably the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Carl Schorske, have already attempted to shed light on Vienna’s role in Western thought beyond the borders of present-day Austria. Cockett takes this exploration further by looking not just at the fin de siècle Vienna of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but also at how the intellectual culture of that period transitioned into the radical thought of the 1920s and early 1930s.
Cockett structures his account of Viennese thought in three acts: First, he describes the educational environment in the early 20th century that laid the foundation for great Viennese thinkers to develop their ideas; second, he outlines the interwar rise of “Red Vienna”—the period from 1918 to 1934 during which the city was run by socialists—and the backlash it sparked among the increasingly powerful fascists; and finally, he chronicles the contributions of Austrians who fled or voluntarily left the country when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. Cockett tells this history by weaving together a rich cast of characters who each played a part in this intellectual culture and its continuation abroad.
In the early 20th century, learning in the city took place in major educational institutions such as the University of Vienna, but also in coffeehouses and from private tutors. The result was a commitment to “exact thinking”—a term Cockett attributes to the mathematician Kurt Gödel, referring to the uniquely Viennese focus on methodological rigor and applying rational, scientific thinking and methods to other topics and fields. Viennese thought was also defined by the pursuit of interdisciplinary knowledge and the “liberating embrace of intellectual heterodoxy and political pluralism,” Cockett writes. This attitude, he argues, is best personified by the philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach, who blended his disciplines and helped inspire a generation of scientists and writers alike.
That intellectual climate was severely curtailed—and forever changed—by the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of World War I. Gone were the collegial coffeehouse gatherings and what Austrian writer Stefan Zweig famously called the “golden age of security.” In their place came a radicalized environment in which thinkers and political leaders sought to use exact thinking to pursue social and political progress, improving conditions for the working class and building a society of neue Menschen (“new people”) governed by reason. The Gemeindebauten, Vienna’s extensive network of social housing, was developed during this period; Karl-Marx-Hof, a massive public housing complex, endures as evidence of this time.
A watercolor painting of the Griensteidl coffeehouse in Vienna, circa 1896, by Reihold Voelkel.Imagno/Getty Images
The political right saw the University of Vienna and the idea of Red Vienna as anathema to its plans. This is partly why Austro-fascists believed the interdisciplinary, experimental work of thinkers of this time—coming from places such as the Vivarium, a research center next to Vienna’s Prater park—had to be “obliterated so comprehensively,” Cockett writes. This meant not just shutting down research and forcing thinkers who disagreed to flee the country, but even seeking to destroy any traces of those places or research. With the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Cockett writes, Vienna transformed from the “greatest metropolis in Europe” to a “city of ghosts.”
Those who fled spurred progress abroad, primarily in the United States and the United Kingdom. Cockett’s argument spans beyond politics and into scientific development, intellectual thought, and social policy. His book does not just focus on better-known Viennese thinkers such as economist Friedrich Hayek, one of the founding figures of neoliberal thought. It also considers groundbreaking architects, the inventor of the world’s first shopping mall, and the first researchers of consumer behavior and marketing. (Lest U.S. readers not yet grasp the point that Vienna’s influence is everywhere, Cockett notes that Viennese architects helped design Mar-a-Lago, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s lavish club in Florida.)
Cockett argues that many of these accomplishments would not have been possible without the methodological precision of the Viennese combined with their penchant for bringing together different disciplines to form something new. The field of consumer behavior in the United States, for example, blended psychology and psychoanalysis with market and economic research; Edward Bernays, an important figure in establishing that field, was a Viennese émigré (and, interestingly, the nephew of Sigmund Freud).
As a journalist who has spent the last half decade living between Berlin and Vienna and writing about the region’s politics, I often point to Austria as a country that—small as it may be—observers of European politics ignore at their own peril. The nation often serves as a laboratory for political developments that pop up elsewhere, notably in Germany, years or decades later. For instance, Germany’s populist far-right Alternative for Germany party has copied some of its rhetoric verbatim from its Austrian counterparts, seeking to become salonfähig (“socially acceptable”) enough to—like Austria’s Freedom Party—eventually enter government.
Read More
Austria’s Far Right Is Back on Top
Four years after a major scandal ousted it from government, the party is leading national polls again.
A Tale of Two Germanies
Thirty-three years after reunification, the country’s wounds are rawer than many would like to admit.
How the European Project Fell Apart
Timothy Garton Ash’s latest book traces what went wrong—and holds some lessons for the continent’s future.
My sense of Austria’s occasionally prescient, under-acknowledged influence on politics went back to the 1980s, when Jörg Haider took over leadership of the Freedom Party, transforming it into the nativist, populist anti-immigration force it is today and inspiring the rhetoric of far-right leaders across Europe. But Cockett traces such sentiments further back still, to the overt populism and antisemitism of Karl Lueger, Vienna’s mayor from 1897 to 1910 and Adolf Hitler’s “first and most influential role model.” (A statue of Lueger in Vienna has been the subject of local controversy in recent years, ultimately leading to a compromise: It will remain but be tilted 3.5 degrees to indicate something’s not quite right with Lueger.)
There is a fundamental tension between the benefits Cockett ascribes to the Viennese way of thinking and its ability to be turned to nefarious ends. As Cockett writes, Austrians, and the Viennese, included both “some of the most remorseless perpetrators of the Holocaust as well as its victims.” Austrian Nazis grew up in the same intellectual environment as the architects of Red Vienna—“they just applied their methodological rigour and ‘exact thinking’ to mass-murder rather than abstract philosophy,” Cockett writes.
One interesting undercurrent running through Cockett’s exploration is the question of who, precisely, should be counted as Viennese. Vienna is a city of immigrants, and many of its greatest thinkers grew up elsewhere. But for Cockett, anyone educated in the city counts. “To be brought up, to be educated and to work in Vienna was to share in a particular, unique, open and cosmopolitan environment,” he writes, noting that the Viennese “were often deeply averse to being categorised …. They were just Viennese.” As he introduces each character, Cockett lists where they were born and how they made their way to Vienna, tracing the journeys of both well-known and lesser-known figures. The composer Gustav Mahler, for example, came to Vienna after growing up in a town on the border with Bohemia and Moravia; Else Frenkel, a psychologist who co-wrote the influential 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, was born in what was then Galicia (today Lviv, Ukraine) and made her way to Vienna to study.
Zweig had a similar view. “Open-minded and particularly receptive, the city attracted the most disparate of forces, relaxed their tensions, eased and placated them,” he wrote in his 1942 memoir, The World of Yesterday. “It was pleasant to live here, in this atmosphere of intellectual tolerance, and unconsciously every citizen of Vienna also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the world.”
After reading Vienna, it’s hard not to be convinced by Cockett’s plea for more recognition for the Viennese, even if seeing the city as the source of most of Western thought remains a bit of a stretch. As for the Viennese who formed and disseminated these ideas? As Cockett writes, “We are all in their debt.”
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.